


So knock me down, tear me up

by Toothless



Category: Sons of Anarchy
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gen, In-Between Seasons 3 and 4, Jax-centric, M/M, Prison, Prison life, Reference to Prior Child Abuse, Reference to Prior Rape/Non-con, Threats of Rape/Non-Con, Threats of Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-31
Updated: 2014-01-31
Packaged: 2018-01-10 16:44:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1162096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toothless/pseuds/Toothless
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jax hates prison. Stockton is hardly the worst place to spend the time, but that doesn’t mean that it’s anything less of a prison.</p><p>Anything less of a cage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	So knock me down, tear me up

Jax hates prison. Stockton is hardly the worst place to spend the time, but that doesn’t mean that it’s anything less of a prison.

Anything less of a cage.

 

When he was fourteen, he’d spent three days in county jail outside of San Joaquin territory. It'd all been smoke - a desperate attempt by the local law to trap down Tig and Mouse (the VP of their brother charter at the time). Mostly, he’d spent his time counting the cracks in the yellowed ceiling, tracing the authorless graffiti running the walls with the pads of his fingers. He’d gotten out when the sheriff couldn’t hold him on any bullshit charge anymore. When he’d met up with Tig, he had smacked him on the back, a little too hard to be altogether reassuring but warm, brotherly all the same. (“Knew you could hold out against the piggies, man. Good work.”)

It had felt like he’d accomplished something. Like he was a man. The stint in county jail felt removed already the, the cagey feeling fluttering away like dust in the wind, like a ghost’s breath.

Prison is nothing like that.

 

Canteen is the worst. No, that’s the Yard. The Yard is the worst. Canteen’s a close second. Canteen means packed bodies and greasy food, too little space to maneuver, and no where to run if shit gets intense. The first weeks (powerless, no back-up and angry Russian retaliation hanging in the air like the scent of blood in a shark tank) the Canteen is like walking a tightrope. Jax can feel eyes on him at all times, but the Canteen minimizes the space and maximizes the audience.

During those early days, Jax still had faith, in the club, in the life, in the world order he’d been groomed for and bled for his entire life. Clay had been a solid presence by his side, the mountain to his valley. A father to a son.

But things change.

(Or maybe they don’t, Jax thinks later, much later. Maybe nothing ever changes and that’s the real problem.)

 

The Canteen. Yeah. Fuck that. Jax has nowhere to sit. Juice got put in isolation last Wednesday. Some fuck tried to stab him in woodshop, almost took of his hand, and the guards, good ole boys, let the fucker off with a warning and put Juice in the Eye. Chibs and Bobby are in another wing - permanently removed from the rest of them and Clay and the others have another lunch hour than Jax. Having no one to sit with - it should feel like high school again, well if high school had thugs of all sizes, even worse food and a noticeable lack of cheerleaders - but mostly it feels like driving blind, the edge of the world sneaking up on you at any moment.

It’s cramped and he knows he’s a target like this, walking unprotected like a dumbass, might as well paint the bull’s eye on his back and get the gut churning anticipation over with. He has enough adrenaline pumping through his system to make his heart feel like its planning to jump ship and his hands are cold and clammy around the obnoxiously red plastic tray he’s holding, but he relaxes his stance, slouching in the same way that made his tenth grade English teacher throw him out of class more times than he can remember, and swags his way through the crowd. If he’s going out in the fucking Stockton canteen, then he’s going out with his stupid fucking head held high.

He doesn’t get stabbed in the Canteen, despite the swaging and the lack of any welcoming seats. He gets hassled though. Some asshole crowding him against the wall, pressing close like he’s starving and Jax is the all-you-can-eat buffet, The guy’s breath is sour and he’s missing two front teeth, and when he rests his chin on Jax’s shoulder, his skin is hot like a promise and a threat.

“You look lonely, _puta_ ,” he purrs, his accent strangely neutral, like he just decided to throw in the Spanish to spice up his vocabulary. His hands come up on Jax’s hips, holding him against the wall. His buddies, ugly fuckers with no discernable tats, wall themselves around him. Not seeing the tats or not recognizing them means shit though. Stockton’s big enough to house all sorts of gangs, SAMCRO-friendly and otherwise. From the look of the guy effectively pinning him the wall he guesses that these guys belong to the latter.

“So you decided to keep me company, eh? Looking for some friends, these guys too silent for you?” Jax jibes back, keeping his hands free and using every inch of height he has on the guy to loom. It isn’t all that many inches, and the guy’s way wider with no neck and bulging arms. Probably hits like a sledgehammer, Jax thinks resignedly. The guy tightens his grip on his hips, fat fingers digging in like claws.

”Don’t run your pretty little mouth now, or I’ll have to shut you up,” he hisses, spit flying out of his mouth and spraying Jax on the chin. He knows this will go one of two ways.

One; he lets this fucker herd him out of the Canteen, probably will have to at least blow him (and if he’s not mistaking the looks the other guys are paying his mouth, them too). They will probably be happy with that, lunch’s not long enough for some real quality time and Jax’s not totally stupid, he knows what his lips look like. He knew this was coming, they all did more or less.

Well, guys like Bobby probably don’t have to deal with this shit, or guys like Clay, but Opie probably did and Juice - thank fuck for the Eye, Jax thinks suddenly, almost dizzy with the relief of that. This is part of the deal after all. It would be the smarter move to simply relax against the wall, let Bad Breath and company take him to some secluded corner, beneath the stairs perhaps, and blow them. Might even buy him some protection if he plays nice and swallows, tempting them with a repeat performance or two. He knows he can do this; he’s good at it. Granted, he never played on that side of the fence before, but he knows people, he can put up a good show if he has to.

Or two: he fights these guys, gets fucked up for his trouble and probably jumped again tomorrow. But what decides it in the end is this: bending over is only worth it if it’s for the biggest bad around. Bad Breath and the Gorillas are small fish at best, playing in the adult’s pool when they should stick to the kiddie one.

So Jax just grins, crazy and mean, nothing reaching his eyes, and punches the guy in the throat. He goes down, coughing like he’s dying (and man, wouldn’t that mess with his ‘out-early-on-good-behavior’-shit he’s been pulling) and Jax has to duck when one of the gorillas comes barreling towards him. He manages to get that one with a clean hit to the solar plexus, guy going down easily enough, before he gets shined pretty bad by one of the other ones. After that, between the wall and the five against one scenario, he gets pretty torn up before three of the guards manage to break them up.

 

(He’s never told anyone, not Gemma or Clay or even Opie, would rather burn his patch, but he’s been on the wrong side of the fence before. It’s one of those things Jax never thinks about, like Thomas, who is more of a ghost than a memory by now.Some shit needs to stay buried for everyone’s peace of mind, and if it’s Jax who has to close the coffin on it, then he’s happy to.

Besides, the first thing he did after getting his patch, after the celebratory night of binge drinking of course, was taking his bike over to Mr. Harris’ place, eighth grade math teacher, walk right through his front door and shot him two times in the chest and once through the head.

It hadn’t felt good afterwards, sitting on his ratty grey couch, Jeopardy playing in the background, and staring at the corpse of the man who used to smooth his hand through his hair, murmuring _you feel so good Jackson, keep doing that, yes just like that, don’t be shy, I like it_ in his ear. His hands - large like Clay’s, like his dad’s - holding him down against a hard desk, the edge digging into his spine, cruel and kind at the same time, like a last kiss goodnight.)

 

After the fight in the Canteen, Jax ends up in the infirmary. It’s the worst place to be. Laid out on his back, cracked rib and split lip, broken ankle in plaster, he might as well giftwrap himself for the Russians. But nothing happens. Infirmary stays clean, no unlocked doors to unsupervised rooms, no “accidental” double-booking of appointments with the prison doctors. Jax gets to heal in peace.

Something’s obviously up.

It’s two weeks after he gets out of the infirmary, ankle still twinging smartly when he puts too much weight on it, which is going to be a bitch because that was hardly the last fight he’s going to have to soldier through before he gets out of here, that he meets Javier.

“I heard you guys are in need of some protection”, is what he leads with, which is simple enough. Jax heard plenty of similar shop talk these last weeks, guys vying for some of the scraps of the old SAMCRO, wanting to dig their teeth into the gun trade, the IRA pipeline, the big bucks. He’s also heard plenty of the opposite, threats from rivals and former allies, promises of torture, of maiming, of leaving only a head behind.

“We have some in the making. It will happen.” It’s a hit on repeat by now, same beat different lyrics, same song he’s been singing all week. Protection will come through. Shit will work out. The lie’s comfortable enough by now to feel like truth. The man, Javier, though Jax doesn’t know his name by introduction, only nods, acknowledging.

“Outside rules don’t apply here, _ese_. Protection means everything.” He sounds congenial rather than threatening, which should place him in the I-have-something-to-offer-you rather than the I’m-gonna-cut you-up category, but Jax doesn’t take any chances and keeps his distance. He’s old, perhaps Clay’s age, but it’s hard to tell with lifers, there is always something vaguely ageless about them. Javier has a neatly trimmed moustache and a tattoo of a woman in a blue shroud on his neck, something that could be a halo shining in gold around her head.

No gang tats but Jax knows little about him. Stockton isn’t part of the Sons’ territory. Otto’s on point of course, but prison politics isn’t really their thing. No one’s buying any guns from behind the bars after all.

Javier is a home boy tough, that much he knows, 50 to life and already on the wrong side of the midlife spectrum. Jax doesn’t know what he did - there’s no polite or reliable way of knowing anyhow - and doesn’t care. Just wants to stay out of trouble, do the time quietly and leave Stockton as a memory, unloved and quickly forgotten.

Javier smiles, like he can hear what Jax is thinking, but only shakes his head.

Jax’s leaning against the fence and Javier talking to him keeps some of the heat of his back, which is nice, especially for yard time, which is usually fraught with too much testosterone and too little physical activity to not end in some alteration or another.

“What would you recommend then?,” he says, mostly to keep the conversation going.

The Yard is never this easy.

Javier’s smile turns a little wicked, “Getting out.”

Jax snorts. “Already planning on doing that, man. 12 months and two weeks left.” He really wishes he had a cigarette, but he’s keeping them for later. If things gets dicey he’d like to have some currency at least.

“Doesn’t matter if it’s in the future, in here, if it isn’t today it’s never.” Javier’s still smiling, like shooting the shit with Jax is amusing him, but he looks serious too. There is something hard about him. He’s not like Alvarez, who is hard in the same way that Clay is hard, too much cunning but too little smarts to be really dangerous.

Jax is used to small potatoes mostly, the Niners and the Mayans, buying glocks and AKs like they’re going out of style, squabbling over patches of territory that never really matter, and stabbing each other in the back so often that it’s almost comforting in its predictability. Since going to Belfast tough, he’s rolled around with some of the big boys too, the ones that spend their days in an actual war and whose faces are plastered on the walls of every Interpol office in the world.

Javier feels closer to that, the hardness of someone who has a plan for grander things.

Jax makes a show of relaxing against the fence, pushing his shoulders back, exposing his chest, his neck. It’s a counterintuitive move, everything about Javier screams threat at him, so Jax makes himself feel unthreatened, look unthreatened. It’s a good strategy, he’s used it hundreds of times. Projection. _Believe it, become it_ bullcrap perhaps, but it usually serves him well.

Javier is built, 6’2 at least and probably around 230 pounds of solid muscle, he could probably take Jax in an honest fight. Probably in an dishonest one as well. Jax has no illusion of that being the case though - an old fashioned beating - if Javier wanted him gone Jax wouldn’t be standing here.

So the question is of course, why is he standing here? Javier is not offering the crew protection, if he wanted to extend a helping hand he would have done it weeks ago. Bobby and Clay got into an argument just last Tuesday with some leftover Aryan brotherhood types right outside Javier’s cell and he did nothing, just watched the guys beat Bobby bloody and give Clay a black eye. But Jax can feel him too.

Javier wants and Jax isn’t blind to things.

So he slouches a little bit more than strictly necessary, smiles the way he smiles at a pretty waitress, at the middle age lady at the store who gives him a free item at every visit, and cocks his hips. And yeah, Javier is following his movement, the ripple of his muscles beneath his skin, the way his pants are low on his hips.

He catches Javier’s eyes on the way, holding his gaze, the smile never leaving his face even when his eyes are cold.

“You’ve been keeping me safe,”Jax tilts his head, “haven’t you.” It’s not really a question, because Jax is knows it to be true as soon as the word leave his mouth. The fight in the Canteen was too public, too many eyes watching, but the infirmary was smoother, more subtle. Probably more expensive too. It would have been easy then, for the Russians to end him. Something stopped them. How convenient. Javier doesn’t say anything, keeps looking at Jax, trusting him to figure it out. And Jax does. He didn’t lie when he told Tara that the only thing he’d ever been good at was being an outlaw, it just also meant he was also good at people. And puzzles. So the Canteen was too public, too much of a declaration, which meant he was planning to make an offer and hadn’t come around to it. Most likely, he wanted to see what Jax would do, faced with a non-lethal but possibly dangerous situation. The infirmary was the offer, the hint of this-is-how-it-could-be. Letting Clay and Bobby get beat up was the condition; only him, no side perks for the crew.

Jax almost laughs, because it feels like he’s being played, but by a businessman not a convict. He would like to think that he doesn’t contemplate the offer then, weighing the good with the bad, the thought of bending over for the biggest bad going through his head again, even if it’s mostly a whisper. (Further back, or perhaps deeper down, the kid who was Jax Teller balls his fists and shakes all over, afraid and angry with it, wrapped up too tightly, a cancer in his heart.)

Jax shakes his head. “Sorry to disappoint. But thanks for the offer.”

Javier doesn’t move right away, making sure this is what Jax wants. It’s oddly cordial, the (most likely, now that Jax knows his pull even while inside) mob boss and the redneck, side by side, discussing the price of protection. After a while, Javier pushes up from the ground, dusts his pants off. He looks almost grandfatherly like that, like Father Kellen would look when he looked at Maureen. It only cements Jax suspicions.

At least it’s nice to be right.

“I understand.” Javier turns to Jax, not too close to be friendly, obviously not giving Jax any benefits without the payment, but not angrily either. Probably means he will let himself be convinced if Jax asks him again later.

He doesn’t know what to do with that, can’t decide if it makes him terrified or relieved. That is not a good thought.

Javier gives him one last look, a little too long to be without invitation. “You can always find me, “ he says, making the offer clear and turns around and leaves.

Jax stays by the fence after, making himself disappear in the background. He knows he won’t be able to hide forever. They need to get some real protection if any of them wants to survive this place.

12 months and two weeks is a long time.

 

When it finally happens, he’s in line for the fucking phones. Looking back it was stupid as hell to develop such a routine, make himself open like that.

But he missed her, always, all the time. The monotony of prison life didn’t really invite sanity after all. Loneliness, sadness, though, they became well-known friends after a while. And in their wake, desperation. 

Neither the picture of Thomas, pressed to his heart at night when he was sure that the guy in the bunk above his was truly and soundly out, nor the baby drawings Gemma sent him, lovingly signed by Abel in bright red crayon, were enough to close the gap. Jax could feel a rift in his chest, a slow, deep ache piercing him from the inside out.

As a kid, he’d always imagined that prison would be mostly boring. He’d been a nightmare, angry and arrogant and smart enough to know trouble when he saw it but too stupid to not seek it out. He used to get Opie in real bad as well, drag him to parties they had no business knowing about, much less attending - drinking, smoking. He’d been kicked out of school for bad behavior, gotten suspended and re-suspended and whatever came after that.

Unser used to put him in holding just to calm him down, used to sit outside the bars, palms pressed together and brows furrowed and try and give him the you’re-better-than-this-spiel. But Jax never really listened, because the world was just right outside, a thin veneer of tile and brick between him and the road, between him and freedom. Unser was a meatwall at best, a pig in a suit, the flimsy obstacle to the irresistible force.

It takes prison, with all its too small spaces and angry bodies, to make him realize that the road? Freedom? It doesn’t exist. It’s all fantasy. Dreams and smoke and shit that’s as much out of reach as the damn moon. Freedom is a privilege that he’s lost and he’s not getting it back.

Prison is a cage but he doesn’t want it to become his fucking coffin. He wants it to end. Ride out the months, he thinks, determined at night in the dark when the guy above him has stopped snoring and the kid in block B (young and thin and shit, Jax could see it written all over him) has stopped crying for the night. Ride it out. Grit your teeth. 

Sometimes it’s just too much. Jax is good with high tension situations. Christ, he used to live for those situations, where violence is just around the corner and death is breathing down your neck. It used to rile him up, animate him - like electricity, a shock through his system, restarting his heart. Prison is like that at all hours, every day, from sunrise to sundown. And it stopped making him live and started killing him weeks ago.

So he calls home. It feels like cheating a bit. Like hiding behind your mom, safely hidden in her shadow. Like he’s a little kid again and afraid of the dark.Tara is always soothing, never mad. He worried a lot, about her being alone (well as alone as one can be with Gemma for an in-law, but still) with two kids. If she would crack under the pressure, under all the weight of all the shit he’d piled on her. But she didn’t. Paradoxically, the tougher the situation, the calmer she is.

When he calls her after getting released from the infirmary the first time (he didn’t want to worry her, but he needed to unload, to let it slide off of him, peel the dead skin from his back lest he never breathe properly again) she only asks about the alignment of his ankle (“You sure it’s properly set? You don’t want that bone to be uneven when the fissures close.”) and leaves it at that.

She puts Abel on the phone, just old enough to get that, yes, the voice on the other side belongs to a person, and yes, that person is daddy. Baby-talking with Abel feels like reaching into the sun, hot and wonderful and painful enough to sear through skin and bone and blacken him inside out. He’s reminded of what he’s missing, what he could be missing forever. And the possibility of that, of losing Abel - not to the Irish or to some genetic heart disease - but to time, to distance, due to his own fucking screw-up, is what makes him decide; never again.

This is it. The last stint, the last ride. Stockton is the stop point before the highway, not the fucking parking lot.

Which is of course, why getting stabbed while waiting in the phone line is such dumb fucking irony.

 

It happens too quickly for Jax to react, nothing like the Canteen fuck-up, which was slow and deliberate. A predator showing its teeth, Bad Breath showing off his chops, his muscle. This is nothing like that.

The guy’s fast, a pro. Probably a long-term resident. The Russian’s inside man, the proverbial Otto Delany. Jax can’t even appreciate the guy’s choice of weapon - sharpened screwdriver, probably took months to set up - before he’s down. He has help, the guy in front of him grabbing the phone cord and wringing it around his neck, choking him and leaving Jax nice and open for some expert shanking. He doesn’t feel the impact, but that’s the shock and thank fuck for that.

He slides to the floor, hands coming up to press against the wounds, but he has no strength, fingers numb and useless, slipping across wet skin.

“Don’t worry dear, you know what it was for,” the guy purrs, soft and oddly intimate before grinning and giving Jax a perfunctory kick to the ribs. The accent is noticeable, but then the Russians have no need to hide. This was obviously a well-planned retaliation and they wanted him - the crew - to know about it.

Jax gasps in pain, nothing really prepares you for multiple stab wounds and a solid kick to the stomach. He can feel blood pulsing from his midsection, pooling down his back and painting the washed-grey linoleum floor in blackish red. It startles him how warm it is, sure he’s seen and felt his fair share of blood before, but never this much when it was his own and usually when it was someone else’s, it got cold pretty quick.

The other guy is long gone, only Russian Otto left, smile still in place. Jax wonders if the guy’s going to stay, camp down in the hallway and wait for Jax to bleed out like some beside-the-road cadaver. He probably would, but someone must have tipped off the guards because the guy suddenly spins on his heels and disappears down the hallway.

A minute later, or it could have been an hour - Jax can’t think, can’t count, every breath loud in his ears like a fucking thunderstorm - the guards show up. Everything is blurry by then, edges of his vision creased like an especially loved photograph, color slipping from his focus and melting into greys and blues and blacks.

His last thought before slipping into the void is of Abel and, standing behind him on a green lawn, a woman with a baby, waving at him from across the space.

 

Waking up the second time in the infirmary is much worse than the first. He’d lost enough blood for the medical staff to ship him to an actual hospital. Unfortunately, he’d stabilized quickly enough - four days at the ICU - so he ends up waking up back at Stockton. He has three deep wounds lining his upper abdomen, neatly sewn together with black thread, keeping him from coming apart. His head feels like it’s stuffed with candy cotton.

When he’d been a kid, he used to trace his fingers along Thomas’ bypass scar. It was both frightening and fascinating to feel the slightly raised scar tissue beneath his palm, the bumps on the otherwise smooth skin. A little reminder of death carved in there like a greeting, a little memento of mortality and fragility, a message that said _Death was here and did not leave empty handed_.

Thomas had once told him that it could ache sometimes, the scar, a hot pulse in his chest, like someone was knocking from the other side. Jax had tucked Thomas’ head under his chin and stroked his’ back, feeling the warmth of his body and the press of his chest against his own. If he closed his eyes he could imagine that they were the same being then, expanding and retracting, sharing a dual heart, one beating in perfect tandem and where no one was sick at all.

The on-call nurse keeps him pretty sedated the first couple of days, but stops doling out the morphine as his internal bleeding risk abates and the stab wounds slowly start to heal. Laying the the infirmary bed is torture. Every sound makes him flinch, every nurse or doctor that passes him by makes him tense up in frightened anticipation. He knows the infirmary is unsafe ground, the graveyard of any prison and he hates it. It not his first brush with the inevitable end, but it’s the first one that has come close to hitting home.

He’s grateful at being alive, which is stranger than it sounds. Life has never been a non-option before, killing is not the same as dying yourself (of course) but Jax always thought it brought him closer to it. Like he was riding on the same road, just in a different lane, close enough to reach out and to touch the travelers on the other side. But that’s bullshit. Killing doesn’t bring you closer to life, it numbs you to it. Closes you off, turns your skin into the armor that keeps you alive, slows you down until you’re crawling on your hands and knees, defeated by the weight of it.

The thought of dying here, defenseless once again, makes him nauseous.

 

In the end, Clay comes through. Deals with the Russians, guns switching hands, promises mumbled. It's a familiar dance at last. An enemy is only a business partner yet made.

Prison is strangely uneventful after that, and Jax is grateful. The world has tilted slightly, righted itself perhaps. But nothing is the same. He can't return to that, to a life that thins out his own, he's too close to snapping. 

During the days he smiles and lends his shoulder to Clay, the father and patriarch, the leader and man. At night he closes his eyes and imagines himself cut loose, shakles abandoned, adrift across a sea. Jax plans his life, the escape, in detail, in color. He sees Tara and Abel and Thomas, too small to know him yet, but they'll have time, he'll make it so. 

All he has to do is wait, just a little longer.

 


End file.
